31/13
You don’t really get into his plight
Tale
An anthology series about high-profile crimes or killers that captured the public’s attention and made headlines. Evan Peters [Jeffrey Dahmer] says they had a Ryan Murphy [creator] rule to follow when they started the show: never tell from Dahmer’s point of view. “As an audience, you don’t really sympathize with him. You look at it more, you know, from the outside.” In many episodes there is a 3M Command(TM) tape that is shown in the kitchen of Jeffery Dahmer’s apartment, this last happening in 1991.
Introduced in Jeremy Vine: Episode #5,195 (2022)
3M debuted its first wave of Command(TM) products in 1996. There are two monsters in this heartbreaking and thrilling story, but they are not Erik (Cooper Koch) and Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), they are José (Javier Bardem) and Kitty (Chloë Savigny). I don’t want to go too deep into the legal aspects of this case because it is not a documentary, but a drama series. However, let me start by saying that if Erik and Lyle were Erika and Lyla, the two daughters, they would never have spent a day in jail.
He was a kind of Truman Capote
This is not to say that Erik and Lyle were blameless, but the mitigating circumstances were so overwhelming and compelling that they should have been sentenced to 10 years of voluntary manslaughter. There’s also Dominic Dunne (Nathan Lane), a vile man who peddled celebrity gossip and cocktails. I want to highlight episode 5, “The Hurt Man.” There are only two characters in the entire scene: Leslie Abramson (Ari Gaynor) and Erik. Director Michael Upendahl places the camera about 12 feet from the table where the two are sitting.
Nicholas Chavez is also fantastic as Lyle
Abramson with his back to the camera (we never see his face) and Lyle facing the camera. Slowly, imperceptibly, the camera zooms in on Erik until it cuts to Abramson and ends with a close-up of Erik explaining the title of the episode. Fascinating! Cooper Koch does a tremendous job throughout, but especially in that episode.
